Within machine vision, Roy has worked on several main topics:
Professor Roy Davies graduated from Oxford University with a BA in Physics; he continued at Oxford, first obtaining his DPhil in Solid State Physics, and then acting as an RA working on electron spin echo techniques. During this period he developed a sensitive method of performing nuclear resonance using a new spin-echo sequence which became widely known as 'Davies-ENDOR'. In 1970 Roy was appointed as a lecturer at Royal Holloway. Roy’s interests and expertise in electronics rapidly evolved until they settled on computer pattern recognition and machine vision.
At that stage Roy was working on shape analysis and sensitive detection of objects in images, and this led to collaborations with the food industry, which needed 100% tireless visual inspection of products. His early work on Jaffacake inspection was followed by X-ray inspection of frozen food packs and inspection of raw products, including wheat grains. Automatic detection of insects, ergot (a poisonous mould), and rodent droppings was successfully undertaken in conjunction with DEFRA. Even insect larvae growing inside wheat grains were detected from infra-red images.
Roy’s vision interests have recently widened to cover surveillance, crime detection and prevention, vehicle driver assistance, and laparoscopic surgery. At the same time he is keen on developing the theory of the subject, and on educational aspects. This has led to the publication of two books on vision and another on the extraction of weak signals from noise in an area encompassing physics, radio, radar, signal processing and vision. These interests are all reflected by the award in 1996 of Doctor of Science by the University of London. He has also been awarded BMVA Distinguished Fellow 2005 by the British Machine Vision Association.